WHEN MARCOS GALPERIN started online marketplace Mercado Libre in a parking garage, he wasn't trying to evoke the origin stories of U.S. tech companies like Hewlett-Packard and Apple. In Buenos Aires in 1999, the garage of his father's leather company was just the best option for fast broadband internet. "It was a building with terrible offices, but at least we had good connectivity," he says.
But like his Big Tech brethren, Galperin spun gold from the dingiest of spaces. Today, Galperin is one of the wealthiest men in Latin America, with an estimated net worth of over $7 billion thanks to Mercado Libre's astronomical growth. The company, now based in Uruguay, started as a clone of eBay but today is known as the Amazon of Latin America. The e-commerce site sold over $11 billion in goods in the third quarter of 2023, a nearly 60% increase year over year.
Mercado Libre's marketplace resembles Amazon, selling goods from electronics to supermarket basics with the promise of 24-hour delivery, but it would be a disservice to paint Galperin as a Jeff Bezos imitator.
He has combined Mercado Libre's e-commerce prowess with payment tools to usher regional shopping into the digital age. By adapting to the complex challenges of Latin America and reinventing Mercado Libre over the course of 25 years, Galperin created a tech company with a market cap of nearly $85 billion, second only to Brazil's state-owned energy giant Petrobras in Latin America. Its regional dominance has little parallel in the rest of the world.
As U.S. and Asian competitors vie for Latin America's red-hot ecommerce market, and regional politics poses risks to its business, Galperin keeps pushing Mercado Libre into new sectors, from mutual funds to crypto. "We're always paranoid," he says. "We don't think it's game over by any means."
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